Free speech does not include defacing public property

If your idea of expressing free speech involves crushing colored chalk into the sides of school buildings, you have another coming. Anytime free speech constitutes a clean-up process that involves both labor and an expenditure of funds, it is clearly vandalism.  

Tuesday’s Daily Wildcat front-page photo is not showing two girls expressing their freedom of speech; it shows incriminating evidence that both of these girls are guilty of vandalism.  My advice to those wishing to express their free speech with chalk is to find other avenues to do so. Many others and myself feel this chalk graffiti is an unaesthetic nuisance on what should be a pristinely beautiful campus. There is a fine line between freedom of speech and vandalism, and it is frustrating that both the student body and members of the university’s administration are naïve to that fact.

Lastly, if one is allowed to chalk school buildings, shouldn’t they also be allowed to graffiti the White House in protest? Go ahead and try that one. All those that are defacing our school’s buildings with chalk should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Environmental science senior

Students should protest without breaking the law

Has the Daily Wildcat‘s readership spent too much time in public schools being taught about how “”the man”” and the police are out to get them, or are they trying desperately to recreate the spirit of their forefathers and start something along the lines of the deviant violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention?

I am extremely disappointed that not only would my fellow students react in such a way to police officers merely doing their jobs, but I’m even more disappointed that the Daily Wildcat would add fuel to the fire.

Laws have purposes. Without them, our society would fall apart. Laws, as annoying as they may be to some, are the very foundation of society itself. When you start ignoring simple laws against vandalism, where does it end? Are you going to start claiming that breaking windows or setting a building on fire is free speech? As anyone who knows constitutional law will tell you, free speech is not absolute. None of the rights established in the Bill of Rights are absolute.

Unfortunately, it seems that some students are predisposed to overreaction at the slightest provocation, which doesn’t bode well for them in the real world. I’m reminded of the people who bristle at traffic fines and claim police officers are overreaching, but then are the first to claim the police aren’t doing their jobs quickly enough when a crime is committed against them. That kind of attitude gets you nowhere in the real world, folks.

There is a right way and a wrong way to protest something. That’s why cities and municipalities all over the country require you to get permits for protests and other civil actions. It’s to keep things civil. When you start ignoring the law just because it doesn’t fit your misguided definition of what free speech is, then civility goes out the window. As goes civility, so goes society, and we’re all university students. We’re supposed to be civilized. How about you all act like it? Is it really so hard to protest something legally?

Political science junior

Casual sex has not completely replaced relationships

This is a response to Tiffany Kimmell’s “”Sex with no strings attached: the new ‘relationship'”” (Sept. 25, 2009) article. Random hook-ups have clearly become more common, yes. However, if you think that they have become some sort of substitution or replacement for relationships (in the minds of college students or anyone else for that matter), you are wrong. Our slightly superficial constituency here may occasionally suggest such a trend, but there is no reason whatsoever to believe that this is actually what any type of majority would think. Surely the men who weren’t interested in relationships in the past are equally uninterested now, just as the rest of us are equally interested in finding a meaningful relationship … even if we have a “”casual hookup”” every now and then along the way.

By the way, the example of the sociology study bares no relevance to the article whatsoever.

Biology sophomore